Information and Decision Support Systems - Principles of Information Systems - page 402

Outputs of a Management Information System
The output of most management information systems is a collection of reports that are
distributed to managers. These reports can be tailored for each user and delivered in a timely
fashion. Providence Washington Insurance Company, for example, uses ReportNet from
Cognos ( www.cognos.com ) , an IBM company, to reduce the number of paper reports they
produce and the associated costs. 7 The new reporting system creates an “executive dashboard”
that shows current data, graphs, and tables to help managers make better real-time deci-
sions. 8 Executives from Dunkin' Donuts use a dashboard to see the status of new stores. 9
The dashboard displays geographic areas and the new stores that are being developed. By
clicking on a store, executives can see the details of how new stores are being constructed and
if any stores are being delayed. The company hopes to grow to 15,000 franchises around the
globe in the next several years. 10 The city of Atlanta, Georgia also uses Cognos to measure
the performance of its various departments and to keep track of its expenditures and bud-
gets. 11 See Figure 10.5 for an example of an executive dashboard. In 2007, IBM announced
that it would acquire Cognos. 12 Microsoft makes a reporting system called Business Scorecard
Manager to give decision makers timely information about sales and customer informa-
tion. 13 The software, which competes with Business Objects and Cognos, can integrate with
other Microsoft software products, including Microsoft Office Excel. Hewlett-Packard's
OpenView Dashboard is another MIS package that can quickly and efficiently render pic-
tures, graphs, and tables that show how a business is functioning. In addition, some software
packages and the Internet can be used to produce, gather, and distribute reports from different
computer systems. Ace Hardware, for example, decided to use a more flexible report system
called WebFocus from Information Builders ( www.informationbuilders.com ). 14 Referring to
the old reporting system, one executive said, “People were getting tied in knots trying to
develop reports in that tool. The tool was very rigid and had a lot of requirements as far as the
way you did reporting.” The new reporting system helped overcome some of these problems.
Figure 10.5
An Executive Dashboard
This MIS reporting system puts
many kinds of real-time information
at managers' fingertips to aid in
decision making.
(Source: Courtesy of CORDA
Technologies, Inc.)